South African anti-apartheid author Andre Brink dies

JOHANNESBURG, Feb 7 (Reuters) - South African anti-apartheid
writer Andre Brink, 79, died on Friday after suffering a blood
clot while on a plane to Cape Town from a Belgian University
where he was collecting an honorary doctorate, local media said.

Brink, who wrote in English and Afrikaans, was a leading
member of the Sestigers, a group of influential Afrikaans
writers in the 1960s who opposed the apartheid government.

Brink's 1973 novel, 'Kennis van die aand', was the first
book written in Afrikaans to be banned by the white-minority
South African leadership. It was later published in English
abroad under the title, 'Looking on Darkness'.

Arguably Brink's most famous novel, 'A Dry White Season'
(1979), focused on the death in detention of a black activist
and was later adapted into a Hollywood film staring Marlon
Brando and Donald Sutherland.

"It's with enormous sadness that one takes leave of one of
our brightest literary stars," Etienne Bloemhof, one of Brink's
former publishers, told 702 Talk Radio.

Brink's 1998 collection of writing on politics in South
Africa, 'Reinventing a Continent', had a preface by
anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, who became South Africa's
first black president after the end of white-minority rule in
1994.

His final novel, 'Philida', a harrowing tale of slavery in
South Africa in the 1830s, was longlisted for the Man Booker
prize.

Brink, who was also a playwright and an academic, was an
English professor at the University of Cape Town when he died.
(Reporting by Joe Brock; editing by Ralph Boulton)